in the soil

I had forgotten with the warmer spell of weather (alternating days of heavy rain and clear bright sun) that for a solid week after I had sown my broad beans it was very cold, the first frosts everywhere glinting in the grass and the soil, and so in short I was disappointed to find that they have not come up at all – I remember too that against all advice I had sown them after the full moon had passed. At least they have not sprung up and been snipped away by hungry mice, I think, and maybe they will come up in time or maybe they are now rotting beneath, cracked open from within by swelling ice. Either way I have a few kale plants to dot among them, and so the possibilities:

kale and broad beans both survive, the brassicas giving shelter and support to the nitrogen fixers which will feed them

kale survives and I have kale

broad beans come up and I have broad beans and the kale rots down into the soil

nothing comes up and nothing survives and the bed is ready and fairly sheltered for the spring

and none of these possibilities are really that bad.

in the kitchen

If you get a whole pork loin off a British butcher it will be slightly longer than an Italian butcher would cut it, edging at the neck end into the more complicated structure of muscle and fat that makes coppa such a satisfying piece to cure and cook with; fine if you are making it into gammon or bacon or cutting it into steaks, less so if you want a piece of meat that will dry-cure uniformly. So when we buy a whole pork loin to cure into lombo we cut off a chunk of the end and dice it up for ragu or find something else to do with it or just put it in the freezer to think about later. Last week because we found some Prague Powder #1 while clearing out the back kitchen and because it seemed like fun I cured the offcut into a little piece of bacon, washed it and dried it and sliced it and then on Saturday another chef brought in half a loaf of his own sourdough and we had some homemade butter left from the Beaujolais night and we had bacon sandwiches for staff breakfast, extremely simple and yet also not.

on the page

Until recently my understanding of the term ley lines was the somewhat mystical one beloved of New Age hippies and psychogeographers, that it referred to sort of lines of power stretching into a web across the British Isles and presumably further afield, and so I was surprised reading Alfred Watkins’ The Old Straight Track (blurbed as the classic book on ley lines) that in his usage it simply refers to man-made tracks he has observed running across long distances, sighted variously on natural landmarks, artificial landmarks, and on the rising or setting sun; only occasionally does he speculate on the religious or mystical significance of these paths, and then always to assert that their practical importance came first and that everything else came after, religion accruing to the power given by specialised technical knowledge. The staves of the priest, of the Egyptian kings, of the Long Man of Wilmington, he asserts, all represent versions of the staves used by these early surveyors to sight their paths across the Neolithic landscape, and maybe he is right.